Abstract
Building on the insights of feminist scholars such as Maria Mies, Wilma Dunaway and Harriet Friedmann that ‘women's work’ in the realm of social reproduction, particularly in the (semi-)peripheries of the world-ecology, often draws heavily upon natural resources and is thus preponderantly affected by forms of resource depletion and environmental crisis including water scarcity, land degradation, pollution and toxification, this article argues for an approach to world-literary criticism that incorporates the insights of social reproduction feminism in order to interpret how literature of the capitalist world-ecology mediates social reproduction. I contend that world-literary criticism can help illuminate the socio-ecology of gendered forms of labour, by analysing how bodily dispositions, subjectivities and habituses corresponding to gendered divisions at household and systemic scales are mediated in specific literary aesthetics, and recuperating the utopian prospects of how texts imagine forms of struggle as arising from the contradictions immanent to capital's dependence on the unpaid work of both nature and social reproduction. In particular, reading novels by Kamala Markandaya, Ousmane Sembène and Latife Tekin, I explore three different world-literary depictions of types of environment-making labour that have been gendered as ‘women's work’ – foodgetting, water-carrying and waste-picking – in order to examine how novels imagine the terrain of social reproduction both as a site of appropriation, violence and crisis, and as the potential ground for organised resistance.
Keywords
Social reproduction feminism, as defined by Susan Ferguson (2017), can be characterised by the theoretical commitment to ‘explaining the ways in which patriarchal and capitalist dynamics inhere in an integral and non-reducible logic of social reproduction [… and] are always concretely interconnected in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of an overall capitalist social formation’. In particular, feminists analysing social reproduction under capitalism have focused on the difference between labour, the productive work that develops capital for market and the often more ‘invisible’ forms of reproductive labour, which encompass the familial and communitarian work that goes into sustaining the workforce and reproducing workers, both literally, as in the case of childbirth, and socially, as in the forms of domestic labour and caring services which are often gendered (Finnamore, 2022). Maria Mies’ ([1986] 1994: 112) phrase ‘housewifisation international’ famously describes how ‘women's’ work under capitalism, particularly that of ‘Third World women’ in the neoliberal era from the 1970s onwards, is unvalued and labelled ‘unproductive’, consigned to the ‘invisible economy’ below the waterline of the formal economy as women are pushed into new forms of precarious, poorly paid work such as handicraft production from home, putting-out systems or agriculture, where they often perform heavy labour in addition to housework, healthcare, childcare and eldercare. At the same time, Mies foregrounds the need to connect the means ‘by which nature was exploited’ with the subordination of women and racialised peoples in colonised lands ([1986] 1994: 3). If social reproduction feminism provokes us ‘to examine the ways in which seemingly independent sets of relations (those that play out in racial, gendered, sexualised, colonialised ways) are part and parcel of a capitalist class dynamic of dispossession and accumulation’ (Ferguson, 2017), then this article advocates that world-literary criticism can help illuminate the socio-ecology of gendered labour, by analysing how bodily dispositions, subjectivities and habituses corresponding to gendered divisions at household and systemic scales are mediated in literary form and content, and recuperating the utopian prospects of how texts imagine forms of dissent as arising from the contradictions immanent to capital's dependence on the unpaid work of both extra-human nature and social reproduction.
Feminist world-systems theorist Wilma Dunaway has observed that ‘women's work is dominant in food production and processing, in responsibility for fuel, water, health care, child-rearing, sanitation and the entire range of so-called basic needs’, and thus ‘most of the world's women draw heavily upon natural resources’ (2001: 16). Critics reading world-culture should interpret women's work/energy in relation to ecology, since
However, this very fact that so-called ‘women's work’ in social reproduction is at the forefront of ecological crises of food, water and waste produced by capitalist enclosures and new commodity frontiers means that women are also often the first to commit themselves to grassroots organising, whether in movements to protect rivers, dams and forests against hydro-projects, mining and pipelines, or in struggles for food sovereignty, seed preservation, re-commoning and reforestation. 1 Gender plays a central role in environmental justice movements where the activism of working-class women and women of colour emerges in proximity to their ‘need to protect loved ones from environmental and social ills that threaten home, neighborhoods, and work sites’ (Stein, 2004: 2). As Celene Krauss writes: ‘By and large it is women […] who make the link between toxic wastes and their children's ill health [… ] This is not surprising, as the gender-based division of labor in a capitalistic society gives working class women the responsibility for the health of their children’ (1994: 260–261).
Capitalism's constant ‘squeeze’ on both social reproduction and extra-human nature in order to preserve profitability produces a contradiction whereby human needs remain unmet, and this very contradiction provides a potential ground for struggle, where the political contestation of humans organising to meet their needs is often conjoined with the mounting ‘resistance’ of extra-human nature that exceeds the discipline of capitalist ecological regimes, which results in such ‘blowback' phenomena as ‘superweed’ effects, blights and pandemics (Moore, 2015: 99). In the realm of food, for instance, Crystal Bartolovich emphasises that collective struggles ‘from below’ for sustenance powerfully conjoin ecology and social reproduction, since ‘food is still – despite the shift to “immaterial labour” in many sectors of the post-Fordist economy and the continuing decrease in the percentage of the human population engaged in agricultural labour – a particularly volatile site of social struggle over concrete planetary resources’ (2010: 42). Furthermore, Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman emphasise that the terrain of social reproduction should be understood as a site not only of struggle but of potential ‘class formation’ on which ‘actions over social reproduction could not only trigger struggles elsewhere, but fuse them together’ (2017: 47).
This article advocates that a critical focus on social reproduction offers key insights into literary mediations of the ecology and politics of so-called ‘women's work’. I take inspiration from world-literary critic Neil Lazarus's recent call for a ‘focus on work (or, more technically, labour) […] as the organising matrix through which some of the key aspects of capitalist modernity have been given representation in literary works’ (2022: 16). Building on Silvia Federici's argument that the transition to capitalism relied upon ‘the development of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women's labor and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force’, Lazarus's own reading of representations of gendered work calls attention to the fact that ‘the relationship between waged and unwaged labour – as also between “productive” and “reproductive” work, and between the work typically performed by men and that typically performed by women – is in every instance politically determined, the effect of socially specific domination and of socially specific struggles against that domination’ (2022: 81). For the purposes of this article, I am particularly interested in how world-literary novels representing so-called ‘women's work’ often depict struggles against capitalist patriarchal domination of both women and extra-human nature as emerging in proximity to crises of social reproduction.
When the conceptual insights of social reproduction feminism are incorporated alongside an approach to world-literature as 'the literature of the world-system' (Warwick Research Collective, 2015: 8) and as 'the literature of the world-ecology' (Niblett, 2020:10) , our critical focus is redirected from literary representations of the struggles of waged (male) proletariats or of statist struggles in the context of decolonisation towards representations of movements arising on the terrain of social reproduction itself, but also to how waged and statist struggles themselves depend on the accompanying organisation of workers in social reproduction, whether in material provision of food and water, or the immaterial resources of nurture. While intensities and valences of literary representation vary – in some texts social reproduction is a critically conscious horizon, in others it is consigned to the political unconscious – I would argue that social reproduction ineluctably appears at the level of content. Far from absent or impossible to represent, the ‘hidden abode’ is everywhere inscribed, in depictions of families, households and parenting; of foodgetting and water provision; of domestic work, carework and sex work; in relations to the land and forms of environment-making whether rural agriculture or urban waste-work. But it also profoundly shapes the political imaginations of texts and their formal capacities to imagine alternative social relations, as in the examples of ‘strike’ fictions that I will examine. Indeed, I contend that world-literature often foregrounds the gendered ‘women's work’ involved in suturing together forces and enabling the everyday survival of resistance struggles – what Selma James (2014) calls the ‘work of keeping the movement together’.
In order to explore this dynamic, I will analyse three ‘signal’ examples of women's reproductive labour and resistance in world-literary fiction. Using novels by Kamala Markandaya, Ousmane Sembène and Latife Tekin, set in India, Senegal and Turkey, I will concentrate on the depiction of three types of gendered labour bound up with environment-making – foodgetting, water-carrying and waste-picking – which have often been categorised as ‘women's work’ and which are particularly prominent in world-literary fiction, in order to draw out analogies between how texts employ similar ecological and gendered idioms and literary devices to create a sense of the consciousness, subjectivity and social practices associated with these forms of work and the kinds of struggle they can engender. Each of these texts is set in a (semi-)periphery of the world-ecology, though I deliberately juxtapose examples of texts set in (post-)colonies that had been formerly colonised by European imperial powers (India, Senegal) with a text from Turkey, which has not been formally colonised, and yet whose development remains indelibly shaped by its semi-peripheral situation and economic subordination within the hierarchical world-system. These three texts each emerge from a key historical-geographical context, enabling a partial periodization of the evolution of the ecological regimes of food, water and waste across the twentieth century. I start with Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve ([1954] 1982), a novel set in post-independence India on the cusp of the Green Revolution, which would fundamentally reorganise agrarian relations and social reproduction. India, of course, served as a crucible for the imposition of new technics of intensified agriculture and debt relations that would later be rolled out across the planet, as well as the accompanying forms of depeasantisation, mass urbanisation and semi-proletarianisation that would follow in the Green Revolution's wake. I then move to Sembène's God's Bits of Wood ([1960] 1995), written on the eve of Senegalese independence, which looks backward critically to the agrarian regime under colonialism and the forcible induction of both peasantries and urban inhabitants into wage and commodity relations, while seizing the railway strike of the Dakar-Niger railway as an opportunity to imagine future emancipatory organisations of life and labour that resist capitalist modes of production and social reproduction. Finally, I will turn last to Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin ([1984] 1996), which is set in a gecekondu – or a Turkish shantytown – that defining Turkish expression of deruralisation and internal migration in the early neoliberal era, and which marks the transition away from a textual focus on food as provision to depictions of the commodification of new zones of informal activity in the sphere of social reproduction, particularly the waste frontier.
‘We will have won the strike, too’: foodgetting, water-carrying and women on strike
I begin with literary depictions of women's work in providing sustenance. Harriet Friedmann uses the term ‘foodgetting’ to encompass the ‘shared and distinct human ways’ of changing environments to get food and argues that over the history of capitalism, food regimes have established hierarchical ‘control over specific territories, over domestic species of plants and animals, and over the humans whose skills and energies reshaped domestic species and landforms’ that concentrated power in the hands of social elites, leading ‘rulers and urban dwellers to first entertain […] the idea that foodgetting was an aspect of a lower animal nature and thus appropriate to slaves, peasants, and women’ (2000: 481). As feminist food critics have argued, food practices and their cultural representations are gendered and, ‘interwoven as they are into the dailiness of life, can reveal the particularities of time, place, and culture, providing an excellent vehicle to contextualize women's lives’ (Avakian and Haber, 2005: 7). Given that foodgetting is fundamentally transformed when integrated into the capitalist ‘world-food-system’, it is unsurprising that world-literary works register sets of ‘food relations’ imbricated within axes of sexism, racism and class and shaped by the histories of colonialism and capitalist patriarchy (Campbell et al., 2021: 11), as well as by forms of resistance to commodification and enclosure of planetary resources.
Take Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve ([1954] 1982), written in the transitional period between India's independence and the Green Revolution that would radically transform traditional agriculture, converting peripheral food production from ‘a peasant-based, integrated farm system of locally grown crops to mono-culture for export and international trade’ (Avakian and Haber, 2005: 12). Set in a rice-producing state in southern India, the novel foregrounds not only the subjectivity of the peasantry, but the specifically gendered work of women working as unpaid family labour in small peasant units that produce independently for absentee landlords. As such, it captures a mode of provisioning dependent on the appropriation of women's unpaid labour in foodgetting, while also heralding the crisis of social reproduction that will ensue when countries in the Global South like India, that were once able to produce their own food, are forced into new forms of import dependency.
In the opening pages, the narrator, Rukmani, married as a child bride to a poor tenant farmer of rice paddy, describes the process of housewifisation through which she is inculcated into new forms of labour: A man is indeed fortunate if he does marry above him, for if he does he gets a wife who is no help to him whatsoever, only an ornament. I know, for I was ignorant of the simplest things […] Kali and Janaki between them had to show me how to milk the goat, how to plant seed, how to churn butter from milk, and how to hull rice. What patience indeed my husband must have had, to put up with me uncomplainingly during those early days of our married lives!
(Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 4–5)
Rukmani learns the labour of social reproduction from other women, especially the tasks of foodgetting: planting, care for animals, the conversion of milk and seed into food. While her husband concentrates on cultivation of rice, their primary cash crop, she cultivates plantains and coconuts, salts fish from the paddy and grows her own vegetable plot: ‘I planted beans and sweet potatoes, brinjals and chillies, and they all grew well under my hand, so that we ate even better than we had done before’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 5). The first-person narration of Rukmani's task-orientated labour is situated in an affective economy, evincing praise from her husband for her ripe vegetables and an eroticised sense of pride that associates her own fertility – ‘the sweet stirring’ in her body – with that of the productive capacity of the plot: ‘I tried not to show my pride. I tried to be offhand. I put the pumpkin away. But pleasure was making my pulse beat; the blood unbidden, came hot and surging to my face’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 5). The aesthetics mediating the ‘forms of consciousness’ corresponding to women's work emerge from historically contingent dispositions of practice (Lazarus, 2022: 81). Unlike narrative aesthetics that associate male waged labour with the agency of self-determination and temporal determinism, Rukmani's consciousness arises from the kinds of tasks she performs, ‘orientated to social and familial reproduction rather than to a more outward-looking worldly kind of activity’ (Lazarus, 2022: 80–81; emphasis in original). Her production and preparation of food is portrayed as an intimate form of work, both emotional and physical, which is essential to the creation of the everyday: a social practice which ‘produce[s] family life from day to day’ (DeVault, 1991: 13) and constructs her own place within the family as ‘one who provides for the needs of others’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 48).
If rice functions for Rukmani's family as a ‘primary commodity’ (Latham, 1998: 1), a cash crop cultivated almost entirely for exchange, then the vegetables of her plot are more like ‘anti-commodities’, crops grown for provision rather than exchange, yet whose production takes place in the shadow of commodity production, providing the unpaid work/energy that sustains the very labour which produces rice for sale (Hazareesingh and Maat, 2016). Rukmani's gendered work in the sphere of social reproduction to produce enough calories to feed the family enables their super-exploitation by the landowner: through the work she does to produce and to assemble, to cook and render foodstuffs edible, the housewife's unpaid labour serves to ‘lower the costs for the realization of capital’ (Mies, [1986] 1994: 126). Later, her eldest daughter Irawaddy is similarly enlisted in childcare and provision: ‘She was a great one for babies, handling them better than many a grown woman while she was still a child’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 11).
However, after the birth of six children, the family can no longer afford to eat the vegetables Rukmani grows, and the novel portrays her entry into the informal economy, as she is forced to sell the goat, and begins ‘to cut and pack our garden produce, selecting the best and leaving the spoilt or bruised vegetables for ourselves’, selling the rest in the market (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 12). The increased demand for calories and decrease of provision foods strains Rukmani's foodgetting capacity, shifting the burden to her body's own productive capacity. Asked why she has continued to breastfeed her three-year-old child even though her breasts are ‘sore where the child's mouth had been’, she replies, ‘I can no longer afford to buy milk, but while my son is young and needs it I will give it to him’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 17). This incident frames what Maria Mies calls ‘women's object-relation to nature’, portraying Rukmani's experience of her ‘whole body as productive’, not only her hands or head ([1986] 1994: 53; emphasis in original). The producing of milk is a ‘conscious, social activity’ through which women appropriate bodily capacities; it is a social labour of foodgetting that cannot be reduced to physiological function or an essentialist understanding of sex (Mies, [1986] 1994: 53; emphasis in original). In Rukmani's case, it is profoundly inscribed by the class and gender relations in which she is embedded. Later in the novel, a drought ruins the crops and Rukmani's milk runs dry. Deprived of the capacity to supplement the family's income by selling food commodities, her daughter Irawaddy takes on the responsibility for feeding the youngest, and becomes a sex worker in exchange for money to buy ‘rice and salt, and milk for the child, who was too weak for anything else’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 53). This is a second appropriation of bodily capacities for the labour of sex work, but framed this time as a shameful fall, away from the socially mandated uses of the body.
Tenant-farmers like Rukmani's family are subject to losses of land rights and welfare over time, liable to land-grabbing and trapped in cycles of spiralling indebtedness exacerbated by a precarious relation to the contingent biophysical forces of extra-human nature. If the novel opens with Rukmani's delight in foodgetting, the affective pleasure in her capacity to feed and provision the family gradually gives way to horror and despair as her productive capacity is strained beyond its limits by ecological conditions of drought, and socio-economic exploitation and dispossession, resulting in the malnourishment of her children and herself, tragically culminating in the death of baby Kuti. Rukmani's physical labour becomes more arduous at the same time as she pays the physical toll of malnutrition and the psychological toll of grief; her anguish is described in a vocabulary that draws on seed symbolism as ‘being full of the husks of despair, dry, lifeless’ (Markandaya, [1954] 1982: 71). As such, the novel's aesthetics and plot powerfully capture both the affective shaping of subjectivity around social practices of feeding and provision associated with peasant women's subsistence in post-independence India, but also the mounting contradiction in the realm of social reproduction which Rukmani and Irawaddy struggle but fail to resolve through their intensifying labour: the tendency of capitalism to generate a chronic scarcity of the resources necessary to ensure the basic survival needs of households and to appropriate ‘so many of the fruits of the workers’ labor that the workers cannot maintain themselves or reproduce their labor power’ (Frank, 1981: 87).
The novel can thus be read as foregrounding the gendered implications of what Mike Davis has called ‘climates of hungers’ – the nexus between the capitalist production of nature and climatological volatility that renders peasantries from (post-)colonies vulnerable to famine and natural disaster when their food regimes are forcibly integrated into the capitalist market (2001: 245). It concludes bleakly, with the family's eviction after their landlord sells their land to a tannery, forcing them to migrate to the city to work in a quarry, thus joining a generation of peasants deracinated by land grabs and forcibly converted from subsistence agriculture to precarious, casualised labour in new industries, where they work for low wages in order to buy food. As such, Markandaya allegorises India's transition to the neoliberal food regime, highlighting what Vandana Shiva has described as the corresponding displacement of women from older forms of productive activity by ‘removing land, water, and forests from their management and control, as well as through the ecological destruction of soil, water and vegetation systems so that nature's productivity and renewability were impaired’ (1992: 337).
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa observe that capitalism ‘has always been unsustainable since it has assumed, from the start and continues to assume, extermination and hunger for an increasingly large part of humanity’ (1999: 17). For Dunaway, ‘Malnutrition is the most fundamental act of environmental sexism that is inflicted by the capitalist world-system upon women and girls’ (2001: 4). In world-literary depictions of social reproduction that focus on peasant subsistence and provision, this hunger is often figured as gendered, concentrated in its greatest intensity in the bodies of women. Scenes of (cisgender) women working to produce food – whether as provision crops, or as milk from their bodies – are frequently conjoined in texts with scenes and motifs of uneven and forced underconsumption, as we have seen in Nectar: haunting images of breasts running dry, of malnourished maternal bodies and emaciated children. These could collectively be described as comprising an aesthetics of ‘blood, breastmilk, and dirt’ in Miriam Bak McKenna's (2018) memorable phrase, that figures the violence of appropriation and expresses the limits of the capacity of the heteronormative household to absorb rising prices for food and the environmental degradation of the land's capacity for provisioning.
This melodramatic aesthetic is a particularly gendered variety of the ‘anti-colonial analytical-melodramatic realist form’ which Sourit Bhattacharya has characterised as central to the ‘catrastrophic realism’ used within realist Indian fiction to capture the ‘catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden vulnerable condition of life and living in postcolonial India’ (2020: 65, 3). However, for all the novel's critique of the crisis in social reproduction and ecology produced by India's transition, and its salutary focus on a female protagonist who can be read as a harbinger of the feminisation of rural labour, its political vision of the novel is a conservative one, particularly in its mobilisation of what Melissa Gira Grant has called ‘the prostitute imaginary’ (2014: 9) – using Irawaddy's turn to prostitution to melodramatically metaphorise the exploitation and coercion ushered in by capitalist modernisation, and depicting her sex work as uniquely abject and humiliating in contrast to Rukmani's idealised domestic and agricultural labour. Rukmani herself is conservative in her advocacy of meek suffering over organised political resistance, urging her sons not to participate in an organised strike of tannery workers, and acts as a repository of traditional values associated with nationalist ideals and ecofeminist nature/culture dichotomies.
By contrast, Ousmane Sembène's God's Bits of Wood ([1960] 1995) offers another deployment of an aesthetics of underconsumption focused on a crisis of maternal productivity of breastmilk, but one which is yoked to a wider politics of resistance. Here, the crisis of women's reproductive labour does not act merely as a melodramatic signifier of the catastrophic reality of economic modernisation, but rather as a source of dissent and collective organisation across the spheres of both productive and reproductive labour. The novel is set during the workers’ insurgencies of 1947–1948 across the Dakar-Niger railway in colonial French West Africa. Near the beginning, Houdia M’Baye, a widow whose husband has been killed by colonial forces in the railway strike, struggles to feed her newest baby, the youngest of nine, whose name is bluntly allegorical: Strike began to cry, and Houdia M’Baye interrupted her journeying in the past to give him her breast – now nothing more than a slack and empty parcel of flesh. The baby seized at it with his tiny fists, sucking greedily, his eyes closed, his head jerking awkwardly back and forth. The breast was already so riddled with scars and pricks that it seemed to have been stuck with pins, and he hurt her. She moved him from one arm to the other and put his mouth to her other breast, but she knew that it would serve no purpose; her milk was exhausted.
(Sembène, [1960] 1995: 53)
Here, again, a woman's drained, wounded breasts serve as a metonym of a crisis in social reproduction; Houdia's children eat dirt to fill their distended bellies; their bodies are malnourished and dehydrated: ‘There had been no distribution of water all day, so once again they had gone unwashed. Their scaly, dried out skin was streaked with dirty cracks, and their eyelashes were caked back against their brows’ (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 51).
The novel depicts the gendered work of foodgetting and water-carrying as producing particular affects and customs which are fundamentally disrupted when the strike interrupts the flow of water and grain. One redolent passage recalls the collective music made by women's pounding of grain: From courtyard to courtyard the women had exchanged their unceasing, pounding rhythms and the sounds had seemed to cascade through the smoky air like the song of a brook rushing through a deep ravine. […] The old mortar in Niakaro's courtyard had been a tree; its roots were still sunk deep in the earth. […] But now the mortar was silent, and the only sound to be heard was the whispering of the trees, announcing a sorrowful day. Deprived of the oils from the pounded grain, the mortar and the neatly aligned pestles lay baking in the sun, from time to time emitting a little crackling sound, as a split appeared in the dry wood. And the women could only watch helplessly, as fissures ran up from the base of the stump (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 98).
The ecological idiom here emphasises the rooting of reproductive labour in a socio-natural organisation of gendered human nature and extra-human nature, where the tree is shaped into a mortar by women's productive activity, and wood oiled by the rhythms of work into an instrument proof against climate. The fissures that crack its base further symbolise the fissures in the particular constellation of foodgetting on which their community relies.
Another passage foregrounds the work of water-carrying from the fountain, which is laborious but also a source of community amongst the women: In the days before the strike the trip to the fountain for water had been the occasion for an exchange of all kinds of gossip, for the spreading of news, and even for arguments; but now there was only a gloomy silence […] Theirs was also a sullen kind of fear, mingled with hatred of this instrument the white men could shut off whenever they wished. The whole system belonged to them, from the water-purification plant through the labyrinth of pipes to the faucet on the fountain itself (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 66).
In contrast to the mortar stump, a relic of the shaping of the environment in the pre-colonial agrarian regime, the tap and labyrinth of pipes represent the colonial infrastructure of ‘modern’ water, which promises better access to clean water, but which is easily controlled and privatised by the colonial administration. As such, the novel represents its food and water crises as rooted in a complex causality: the result of the privatisation of the water supply by the colonial administration, which turns off the taps in an effort to halt the strike; the closing of the local shops which refuse to offer rice and milk on credit to the wives of strikers; the exacerbation of hunger and dehydration by climate and drought; the insufficiency of paid wages to cover the costs of social reproduction for workers’ families; and the failure of the striking male workers to aid the women in finding food or water, since they consider this ‘women's’ work. Ramatoulaye accuses the strikers of turning a blind eye to hunger and thirst in the ‘hidden’ abode of social reproduction: ‘The men know it, too, but they go away in the morning and don’t come back until the night has come and they do not see’ (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 69).
In contrast to Nectar, however, whose politically conservative protagonist advocates acceptance of suffering over organised resistance, Sembène's novel explicitly imagines women's resistance as arising from the terrain of social reproduction, contesting the manufactured scarcity of food and water. Instead of serving only as a sentimental condemnation of capitalism's excesses, the figure of the woman without milk becomes the incitement to rebellion. First, Ramatoulaye steals a ram from a rich merchant in order to feed the women and children in the compound, and the other women refuse to pay the exorbitant prices of a water carrier selling commodified water. The women's gathering to prepare a communal meal is described in terms that evoke Silvia Federici's analysis of witches as figures of reproductive autonomy (Federici, 2018): ‘the circle of women clustered around the mortar like a gathering of witches in the darkness of the courtyard’ (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 111). The next day, after Ramatoulaye is seized by the colonial police, the women fight back with improvised weapons, exulting in their growing empowerment and politicisation: ‘Overcome by sheer weight of numbers, the police beat a hasty retreat. […] Some of the women, however, formed into little groups and began patrolling the streets of the neighbourhood’ (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 121).
Similarly, in the village of Thiès, when the striking men seem in danger of capitulation, it is the women, led by a sex worker named Penda, previously stigmatised in the community for violating gender norms and sexual mores, who decide to march to Dakar to protest their inability to subsist without food and water: ‘for us women this strike still means the possibility of a better life tomorrow. We owe it to ourselves to hold up our heads and not to give in now’ (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 181). The women's march – a kind of strike against housework long before the wages for housework movement emerged – not only breaches the traditional gendered division of private and public spheres – ‘It was the first time in living memory that a woman had spoken in public in Thiès’ (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 187) – but also leads to the eventual success of the railway strike, thus suturing the fragmenting movement back together.
Furthermore, the women are inspired to demand ‘pay’ from their husbands for their housework, so that it no longer goes unvalued and unnamed: ‘After the strike I’m going to do what the wives of the toubabs do, and take my husband's pay!’
‘And if there are two of you?’
‘We’ll each take half, and that way he won’t have anything left to spend on other women. We will have won the strike, too!’
(Sembène, [1960] 1995: 203)
Their activism leads to a reorganisation of social reproduction and a contestation of patriarchal divisions, as the men are persuaded that ‘their old feudal customs had no place in a situation like this’ and begin joining in the labour of foodgetting and water-carrying: Now, husbands, sons, and even fathers could be seen every morning, leaving their homes in search of water and returning at night, triumphantly pushing a barrel or carrying a sackful of bottles. At last the men had found something to do which not only occupied the long, empty hours, but helped to relieve the scarcity of food and thereby made it possible to carry on with the strike (Sembène, [1960] 1995: 205).
Unlike Nectar's Irawaddy who serves as a tragic figure of capitalism's disruption of traditional notions of women's sexual purity – the woman driven into allegedly ‘shameful’ prostitution – Penda is no longer ostracised by the end of the march but is celebrated as a successful example of the contestation of the capitalist alienation of the bodies and minds of workers, no matter what kind of work they perform. Thus, the two novels provide an important contrast that demonstrates the extent to which social reproductive crises can provide opportunities for emancipatory reorganisation, but can also produce conservative, or even authoritarian populist movements that promise to redress the crisis through a ‘return’ to national ‘values’, including those which insist on ‘traditional’ roles for women within gendered binaries.
Sembène's novel, charged as it is with internationalist socialist conviction rather than simply nationalist sentiment, imagines the contradictions that arise on the terrain of social reproduction as creating the opportunity for organised struggle, not just of the unionised male proletariat, but of women workers in food and water production and sex work. The novel is emphatic that it is only through the conjoined resistance of both women and men that the strike succeeds, but also suggests that anti-capitalist resistance makes visible the living, concrete relations through which social reproduction is achieved in such ways that it becomes possible to challenge and change patriarchal customs as well as divisions of labour organised by class and race. Indeed, I would suggest that the novel is exemplary of a broader tendency in world-literary texts that portray strike actions and anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles to depict intersecting crises of social reproduction alongside them, in such a way that the horizon of social reproduction is foregrounded, no longer consigned to the political unconscious of the text, but explicitly thematised at the level of both plot and imagery.
I have concentrated in this section on two depictions of ‘women's’ work in mid-twentieth-century regimes of foodgetting and water provision – in Sembène, the agrarian regime under colonialism through which both peasantries and urban inhabitants are inducted into market and wage relations; in Markandaya, the eve of the Green Revolution. In both texts, the focus on foodgetting is notably still as provision, before the neoliberal transition to flexibilised labour, ‘fast food’ consumption and import dependency, and the rise of commercialised agriculture and privatised water, when women in (post-)colonial peripheries would lose artisanal jobs and local produce markets to export/import economies. However, in my last section I want to concentrate on a depiction of waste-picking in Tekin's Berji Kristin that marks this reorganisation of women's work within the neoliberal ecological regime.
‘Shepherds of garbage’: waste-work and resistance
Capitalist accumulation in Fordist production necessitated a spatial division of labour that separated the sphere of production from warehouses of stored commodities and from consumers in their households, and thus simultaneously required a new proliferation of product packaging, leading to disposability culture and planned obsolescence. In core countries during the Keynesian era, the substitution of commodities for unwaged household labour bolstered the demand for single-use packaging, while the introduction of ‘systematized municipal waste collection and landfilling elsewhere’ made the disposal of new waste easy for household members (Munro, 2022: 121). However, in the 1970s, intertwined crises of over-accumulation and waste erupted and posed a set of irreconcilable demands: ‘shortage of landfill space in post-industrial societies challenged governments with reducing waste production’, yet without decreasing mass consumerism, regulating industrial waste or constraining disposability culture (Bonatti, 2018: 42). As a temporary fix, the Fordist waste regime gave way to the neoliberal waste regime, characterised by the rise of a ‘rhetoric of personal responsibility of waste’ in place of state governance, convincing private households to take on the ‘virtuous’ work of proper disposal, thus providing materials as ‘free gifts’ to industry by performing the unwaged work of sorting recycling from undesirable waste (Munro, 2022: 118–121). As Irmgard Schultz (1993: 60) contends, this waste-work adds the labour of environmental sustainability to women's unpaid reproductive work. As such, the waste crisis is part of the larger expression of the ‘crisis of care’ under neoliberalism, where increasing reproductive work is relegated to women, while at the same time their capacity to perform it is undermined by the stripping away of welfare provisions and state services (Fraser, 2016). Reproductive and care work in core situations has increasingly been outsourced to disenfranchised and migrant workers. Just as waste began to be exported internationally, easing pressure on First World landfills, so too has the ‘dirty, manual’ waste-work of picking and processing been globally outsourced, where it is most frequently migrant women who take on this ‘unseen environmental work’ (Bonatti, 2018: 42–43).
In Turkish writer Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills ([1984] 1996), which chronicles the birth and evolution of an illegal gecekondu, the compound crisis of waste and care is embodied in the topos of the shantytown built on reclaimed land from a dump. Gecekondu translates as ‘made in one night’, and the novel's opening describes a land invasion of dispossessed migrants from the countryside who move in overnight to occupy a garbage hill. The neoliberal era has been characterised by mass urbanisation and internal migration to the megacities of the Global South – resulting in what Mike Davis (2006: 57) calls the ‘urban climacteric’, where marginal and subaltern groups within nation-states who are excluded from traditional forms of property ownership and formal economy and designated as ‘surplus people’ are frequently led to occupy garbage dumps, landfills and polluted, undesirable sites in cities in order to build basic shelters which over time cohere into shantytowns. In Turkey, the gecekondu originally emerged as a collective response to the state's failure to provide infrastructure for the immense surplus of labourers dispossessed from the northern countryside after the modernisation of Turkish agriculture in the 1940s (Saraçgil, 1998: 104). Migrants were forced to construct their own shantytowns, and from the mid-twentieth century onwards, gecekondus began to form ecological hubs with the import-substitution factories and sweatshops surrounding them. The 1970s ushered in intense inflation linked to the oil crisis, accompanied by a surge of political organisation by radical leftist groups occupying ‘rescued regions’, organising workers strikes and demanding state services (Cosar and Yeğenoğlu, 2009: 1). However, after the 1980 military coup, brutal privatisation and dismantling of state services ensued, intensifying the flexibilisation of labour and driving gecekondu populations into new forms of subcontracting, home-working, contract and precarious labour, deregulating environmental protections and reducing real wages, rendering migrants financially insecure and their health deeply vulnerable at the same time as living costs soared (Peker, 1996: 9–10). The economic shocks of the early neoliberal era ‘forced individuals to regroup around the pooled resources of households and, especially, the survival skills and desperate ingenuity of women’, as ‘deindustrialization and the decimation of male formal-sector jobs compelled women to improvise new livelihoods as piece workers, liquor sellers, street vendors, cleaners, washers, ragpickers, nannies and prostitutes’ (Davis, 2006: 158).
If Markandaya's novel is characterised by ‘catastrophic realism’ and a strategic deployment of melodramatic tropes, and Sembène's novel is characterised by a ‘committed’ socialist realism, in Tekin's novel, the use of irrealist imagery and events – whether showers of chemical ‘snow’, purple children or blue spots – figures the socio-ecology of a slum whose reality seems unreal to its inhabitants, capturing the dematerialising effects through which capital turns human and extra-human nature into disposable waste, and figuring the extremities of toxicity and slow violence. This shift from more obviously realist depictions of gendered labour to irrealist aesthetics figures the violence and rapidity of cultural and environmental transformation in the neoliberal ecological regime, and the sense that a previous reality is in the process of dissolution, so that the literary realism associated with a bounded locale and stable, persistent sense of reality is no longer capable of mediating everyday experience. Confronted with external forces beyond their control, the Flower Hill inhabitants generate fabulist myths to make sense of their local reality, with fragments of an earlier social order lingering on in elements of oral folklore, but reconfigured to express the bewilderment of new conditions. Seemingly fantastic practices – ‘holding on to roofs, wearing plastic sacks at night and washing in bluish hot water’ – come to seem as ‘as natural as eating and drinking’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 32). As such, the novel's innovative use of episodic structure, garrulous narration and critical irrealist aesthetics mediates the mixture of cultural forms and modes of production attendant on the migrants’ move from village to city and figures the delirious experience of socio-ecological transformation and external violence of structural adjustment, breaking with the dominant tradition of Turkish social realism previously used to portray peasant subsistence.
The garbage hill is gradually shaped into a new environment, ironically dubbed Flower Hill, through human labour, primarily the environment-making work of women engaged in the unpaid work of social reproduction, divided into huts and allotments ‘marked off with small stones and wire’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 24). Their enclosures of ‘wasteland’ create urban approximations of village space, complete with gardens in which women grow subsistence crops and raise chickens, subsidising their husbands’ precarious wages with provision crops instead of purchased commodities. At the same time, the women are forced to take up new forms of labour outside the realm of foodgetting. Early in the novel, the work of waste-picking is explicitly framed as ‘women's work': Back in the village the shepherd girls who used to milk the sheep that grazed out in the summer pastures at night were called ‘Berji girls’ by the community who held the job of bringing in the milk and carrying it to the village in high esteem. […] On Flower Hill, only the girls who picked over the refuse were considered worthy of the name and awarded such praise. […] Collecting garbage was considered child's work, women's work. The women filled their pouches rapidly as though gathering herbs, or sorting over cracked wheat. At the same they minded their homes and children. The men went without work for days (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 31–32).
The passage mediates the transition from the traditional roles of women's agrarian labour in farming, dairying and animal husbandry to new forms of income-seeking activity in the tertiary informal sector. It also marks migrant women's incorporation into the neoliberal waste regime: instead of farming the land, they have become shepherds of garbage, undertaking the toxic, dangerous work of waste-picking, which the men refuse to perform, holding out instead for higher-paying factory jobs. Fatma Özlem Tezcek and Özlem Polat observe that new forms of home-based and informal work in Turkish shantytowns have changed traditional gender hierarchies into a new kind of hierarchy which forces the monetisation of women's social reproductive work and the ‘acquisition of traditional patriarchy by capitalist production and social reproduction processes’, even as ‘the value which is created by these women during the reproduction and production processes is underestimated by their husbands’ (2015: 7).
Flower Hill's resilience relies on the unpaid work of women. The energy, vigour, humour and creativity of the squatters as they develop an ecology of survival is persistently figured throughout the novel, but their ingenuity is always held in tension with the health costs of their inhabitation of wasteland, described repeatedly as a ‘wound’ that cannot heal. The gecekondu is a ‘disabling environment’ that is materially productive of disability and illness, characterised by the slow violence of toxicity that accumulates over time (Carrigan, 2010: 257). When the trash-pickers successfully negotiate with the landfill owner to be paid per kilo for their pickings, they are soon poisoned by the waste: ‘Instead of precious stones and pieces of gold, blood-red sores appeared on their hands’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 31). Their local water supply, which they sacralise as the ‘Water Father’, is contaminated by effluents from an unregulated chemical factory, which pours ‘showers of pure white’ over Flower Hill, killing vegetation and causing neurological deformations: ‘Hens curled up with drooping necks and died, and people were unable to hold their heads upright. In the middle of playing, children turned dark purple as if drugged and fell into a deep sleep’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 28). Similarly, a detergent factory floods the earth with ‘hot bluish water’ which produces uncanny transformations: ‘The skin of some began to peel while the faces of others turned purple. Bright blue spots came out on the children's bodies’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 29). As a result of exposure to industrial waste, the women suffer fevers, poisoning, stillbirths, birth defects, maternal mortality, cancers, blood disorders, as well as crises of mental health, their bodies and minds bearing witness to the ecological costs externalised to peripheral women by the neoliberal waste regime. Indeed, Tekin's novel features another graphic portrayal of a mother unable to feed her child, which recalls the melodramatic appeal of Markandaya: ‘instead of milk, blood poured from her breasts and open sores appeared. Şengül's lament reached the sky over Flower Hill’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 44). This time, however, Şengül's inability to breastfeed is not caused by a ‘climate of hunger’, but rather by toxic exposure to waste.
The intertwined crises of waste and care are portrayed as directly impacting women's reproductive health, but also as a site of resistance. Women play a central role emerging from their proximity to the terrain of social reproduction, acting in defence of water, food, land and household. The male factory-workers repeatedly go on strike, but every time, it is only when the women join the battle that concessions are wrung out of politicians and capitalists: the right to remain on the land, water infrastructure, pay for garbage-picking, access to public transport. The women undertake a series of struggles against toxic contamination, land appropriation and community dissension emerging from the conflict between patriarchal values and the undermining of social reproduction. When the owner of the neighbouring factory threatens to clear the squatters, ‘Women marched on the factory with clubs, and when they entered and failed to find the owner they knocked the workers to the ground and beat them up’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 28). In a second instance, when union organisers are trapped and beaten, the women and girls shout and wail, impeding the strike-busters, and a matriarchal leader in the community pulls a gun on the refrigerator-factory owner, Mr. Izak, and carries out a sit-in until the strikers have safely escaped (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 95–96). In a third instance, when the shantytown is flooded with chemicals and cut off from access to unpolluted tap water, Mother Kibriye, a wise woman and folk healer, incites the women to demand clean water, and Fidan of Many Skills, a sex worker, leads a charge on the padlocked pump at a nearby factory: Seizing a tin she struck it hard again and again, and gathering around her all the people in the community she led them down the hill, until the earth and sky throbbed with the din. […] The hut people on the march for water raced behind Fidan like an avalanche of rocks until they reached the breeze-block yard and brick factory (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 61).
The ribald narration celebrates the carnivalesque upending of patriarchal power and class relations, and revels in Fidan's righteous rage and wit: when an opponent tries to shame her by lifting up her skirt to expose her ‘flowery underpants’ and shouting ‘Whore!’, Fidan peels off her knickers and puts them on his head, leading to a rechristening of ‘Rubbish Road’ to ‘Panty Way’ (Tekin, [1984] 1996: 62). Here again, a sex worker becomes the leader of the demand for clean water, while simultaneously challenging patriarchal power.
Fidan's status in the community is liminal, subject to stigma, but also winning the respect of her fellow women who come to see her as an emblem of sexual autonomy to which they aspire. This sense that Fidan defies or crosses the boundaries between productive, unproductive and reproductive work is perhaps central to why a sex worker in this novel, as in God's Bits of Wood, is imagined as becoming a leader of resistance. Penda and Fidan are radicalised both because they are less able to comfortably internalise patriarchal ideology because they are excluded from the consolation of a clearly defined role within the household or the nuclear family, but also because as informal labourers who commodify their sexual labour, they are excluded from the sphere of male proletarian labour. Marginalisation provides opportunities for political conscionisation as well as a propensity to organising forms of mutual aid and solidarity, as Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell suggest: ‘sex workers constitute both a class “in itself” (as a shared condition of exploitation) and “for itself” (as structural antagonism). […] Severed from the proletariat and left to labor on her own, the independent sex worker—like the service worker—forges her own class consciousness’ (2021: 508). As such, both Sembène's and Tekin's plots utilise the sex worker not primarily as a melodramatic metaphor of exploitation or coercion, but rather as a transitory figure who is understood as being able to fuse together struggles and help generate new solidarities in the midst of both reproductive and ecological crisis.
In this article, I have suggested that it is productive to examine cultural registrations of different types of reproductive labour in order to examine how world-literary fictions imagine the terrain of social reproduction both as a site of everyday appropriation, violence and crisis, and as the potential ground for organised resistance and resource insurgency. By juxtaposing texts from two historical contexts of social reproduction – the first on the cusp of the neoliberal turn, before earlier forms of provision and subsistence have been reorganised, and the second after the transition to late neoliberal capitalism – I have sought to demonstrate the utility of periodising literary representations of social reproduction in terms of the geographical and historical contexts of fundamental shifts in gendered work in order to understand the ecological regime of capitalist patriarchy and the manifold forms of exploitation and appropriation it engenders. I have concentrated on three types of labour bound up with environment-making – foodgetting, water-carrying and waste-picking – which have often been categorised as ‘women's work’ and which are particularly prominent in world-literary fiction, in order to draw out homologies between how texts employ ecological idioms to create a sense of the gendered consciousness, subjectivity and social practices associated with these forms of work. In particular, I have shown how analogous literary devices are used in representations of social reproduction, whether the melodramatic aesthetics of ‘blood, breastmilk and dirt’ encompassing imagery of wounded breasts and starving bodies used to communicate the ‘squeeze’ on social reproduction; the narrative consciousness of gendered characters whose task-orientated roles in childcare, agriculture, provision or sex work is essential to their sense of self and environment; or, and at the level of form, the construction of plots whose climaxes hinge on the collective organisation of women workers, portraying their resistance as essential to the suturing together of larger movements, whether anti-colonial or anti-capitalist.
